As in many arctic regions, impacts of increasing environmental stressors such as climate change and industrialization (particularly mineral exploration and mine development) have led local Inuit in northern Labrador to notice changes in their environment. In addition, they have expressed concerns that research and monitoring programs aimed at understanding and tracking these changes are lacking in many areas and do not accurately reflect their knowledge and concerns. Many communities feel powerless in the face of these changes as they lack the resources needed to respond. In consideration of this, an integrated regional approach has been initiated in Nunatsiavut to ensure concerns from all stakeholders, including Inuit as well as major industrial and governmental organizations, are adequately addressed. The purpose of this study was to further the understanding of environmental changes in Anaktalâk Bay (the shipping route to the Voisey’s Bay Nickel mine) and the effects of these changes on local Inuit in order to inform the development of a multi-partner monitoring (MPM) program for the area. The research was conducted using a participatory approach that included documenting Inuit knowledge (IK) obtained during a workshop involving 14 long-term residents of Nain (>25 years; both genders) in December 2006. Trends identified during the transcript analysis highlight that often the most severe perceived effects on Inuit occur when environmental stressors work synergistically. Key linkages between environmental changes and effects were also identified. The workshop findings document the local desire for a monitoring program to track ecosystem-based changes, as well as the social, economic and environmental effects of these changes, to ensure that Inuit are able to mitigate these changes, and adapt when mitigation is not possible or sufficient. Workshop participants voiced an interest in participating in future monitoring activities and it is anticipated that program development will give both researchers and community members an opportunity to continue to work together and learn from each other, in order to develop and implement relevant and appropriate local solutions. Ultimately, this program should begin to address the Inuit desire in this region to strengthen and protect their relationship with the environment. / Thesis (Master, Environmental Studies) -- Queen's University, 2007-11-20 12:02:32.619 / Queen's University Environmental Sciences Group Nunatsiavut Government ArcticNet

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Given the dynamic and unpredictable nature of modern business environment, organizations need to always be ready for change. It is essential for employees to be able to accept change initiatives at workplace and contribute to them constructively.  The authors of this research suggest that due to the similarities in the nature of their implementation process, projects are the most appropriate vehicle for implementing change initiatives. Change initiatives implemented through projects take characteristics of planned change and exclude emergent changes from the scope the scope of this research. The initiating phase of a change project is devoted to creating readiness for change, which is the main focus of the research. The purpose of this study is to investigate the role of organizational culture in creating readiness for a change project. The research looks at the process of creating change readiness. This provides a ground for identifying the importance of organizational culture and its interconnection with change management efforts. Further, the dimensions of organizational culture are identified in the relation to change readiness. The literature suggests that these dimensions create change readiness. If organizational culture does not incorporate the identified dimensions of organizational culture, change management efforts should be applied to reinforce or create them. Eight interviews were conducted with change leaders/ project managers. Each interview was conducted in the context of a change project experienced by the interviewee, in order to gain an insight in to the influence of organizational culture on creating change readiness. The study finds organizational culture as being pivotal in creating change readiness. The insight taken from the empirical data allows differentiating between organizational culture as a whole and organizational culture created within the project context by change management efforts. It was found that organizational culture in its exclusivity, does not lead to readiness for a change project. Organizational culture rather builds a foundation for implementing change and creates readiness for a change project through mediation of change management efforts.

The most important component of change management is the employee's endorsement or "buy in" of the new process. Many managers underestimate this aspect (Wilbur, 1999:12). Developing new processes and systems are relatively easy compared to "changing behaviour and managing people's emotional responses ... " (Wilbur,1999:13) As common as change is in today's organizations, employees still do not like it, and display amazing resistance. The purpose of this study is to investigate the causes of resistance to change that affects males and females in junior and management level in an organization. It is hoped that the results obtained from the study will provide a greater understanding of the causes of resistance that affects employees' in an organization. Furthermore, to understand if causes of resistance affect the genders, i.e. if certain causes of resistance affects females more than males. / Thesis (M.Com.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2005.

An eddy covariance system and micrometeorological station was deployed at two locations along the coastline of Hudson Bay during the summers of 2005 and 2006 to document and to understand mass and energy fluxes in high-latitude intertidal and near-shore environments. Despite the proximity of these two zones, it was found that they exhibited distinctly different characteristics. The near-shore zone was a sink for CO2 with an average uptake of -0.11 μmol·m-2·s-1 and the intertidal zone tended to be a source of CO2 with an average efflux of 0.04 μmol·m-2·s-1 with considerable variability due to the action of the tides. Sensible heat fluxes in the near-shore zone tended to be small and negative and both latent and sensible heat fluxes were significantly enhanced in the intertidal zone. Significantly, increasing wind velocities did not appear to play a role in the enhancement of these fluxes and onshore winds were observed to be unusually dry. As such, key differences were observed that stood in contrast to the results and the conclusions of other flux studies conducted in similar high-latitude coastal-marine environments. It is suggested that these differences could only be understood in the context of the proximity of these areas of living and dead kelp, their respective differences in water depth and the occasional occurrence of a sea-breeze effect that may have implications for the observed fluxes in these areas.

It has been said that the only thing constant in life is change. Whether it is a change in the seasons, in a stage of life or in one’s thinking, change is a part of the ebb and flow of living. Educational institutions are not immune from change, and indeed, should model the learning process and be the very places where practices and procedures are continuously being examined, revised, and enhanced. This qualitative study uses Michael Fullan’s Six Secrets of Change (love your employees; connect peers with purpose; capacity building prevails; learning is the work; transparency rules; and systems learn) as a filter through which to view the process of educational change. Nine school principals stratified across Early Years to Senior Years schools were interviewed to reflect on their personal experiences with facilitating educational change within their work contexts. The data collected from the interviews was collated according to each of the six secrets to discover what commonalities might exist. Each of the six secrets was discussed by presenting the supporting data and some generalizations were drawn. Data from the interviews indicated that all six secrets were evidenced in varying degrees.

Climatic change has been observed in many locations and has been seen to have dramatic impact on a wide range of ecosystems. The traditional method to analyse trends in climatic series is regression analysis. Koenker and Bassett (1978) developed a regression-type model for estimating the functional relationship between predictor variables and any quantile in the distribution of the response variable. Quantile regression has received considerable attention in the statistical literature, but less so in the water resources literature. This study aims to apply quantile regression to problems in water resources and climate change studies. The core of the thesis is made up of three papers of which two have been published and one has been submitted. One paper presents a novel application of quantile regression to analyze the distribution of sea ice extent. Another paper investigates changes in temperature and precipitation extremes over the Canadian Prairies using quantile regression. The third paper presents a Bayesian model averaging method for variable selection adapted to quantile regression and analyzes the relationship of extreme precipitation with large-scale atmospheric variables. This last paper also develops a novel statistical downscaling model based on quantile regression. The various applications of quantile regression support the conclusion that the method is useful in climate change studies.

Global climate models predict changes in precipitation patterns in many areas of the world. Extreme precipitation in particular is poorly represented in climate models and there are significant difficulties involved in assessing the frequency and severity of future extreme precipitation events. In this study, several methods have been reviewed and compared for estimating projected changes in Intensity-Duration-Frequency (IDF) curves, commonly used in urban hydrology. A theoretical approach based on geostatistical considerations is employed to derive reasonable areal-reduction factors that make it possible to compare gridded model data with observations. The mean value method and QQ-mapping have been used to remove biases from modeled data. A simple scaling model has been developed to construct IDF curves using the bias-corrected modeled data for the control and future climate. To investigate uncertainties in predicted changes, different simulations from the North American Regional Climate Change Assessment Program (NARCCAP) have been analyzed.